Richard L. Feigen to Sell Select Old Masters

The venerable American art dealer Richard L. Feigen is selling a handful of prized Old Masters paintings from his own collection—works that had hung on the walls of his Manhattan apartment—at a Christie’s auction in New York in May.

The core of the sale includes Feigen’s beloved Italian and Baroque masters, including the dramatic Vanitas Still Life, the only known still life by the Italian Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino, who lived from 1591 to 1666. The richly detailed painting, one that Feigen says has long been a favorite, features a large skull and is estimated to sell for about US$3 million.

Also on offer is another favorite, Annibale Carracci’s Virgin and Child with Saint Lucy and the Young Saint John the Baptist, estimated to sell for about US$4 million. Carracci lived from 1560 to 1609.

“Parting with them is difficult,” Feigen says.

The long-time New York art dealer says he is reluctantly letting them go because he’s now 88 years old and will use the proceeds for his retirement fund.

Feigen was drawn to various areas of Old Masters from his university studies. While he collected and sold 20th century works, notably the German expressionists, he found it easier to collect Old Masters because the market was less competitive.

“There were more opportunities,” Feigen says. “Since I had a background in it, I understood a lot of what I thought was significant.”

Feigen “has an incredibly acute eye, extraordinary sophisticated taste,” says Francois de Poortere, head of the Old Masters department at Christie’s. “He loves Italian pictures mainly, but also has great taste for (JMW) Turner, (Richard Parkes) Bonington, and (John) Constable, for example, the English Romanticists.”

After moving from Chicago, where his gallery focused on German expressionism, Feigen planted roots as a New York dealer in the 1960s, selling what was then contemporary art (today’s modern and impressionism) in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. He was an early supporter of several notable artists, including Francis Bacon and John Baldessari, and he continued to collect German expressionism. Feigen’s gallery today is on East 77th in Manhattan.

“Being a dealer of stature, he was able to collect for years works of the best kind in all these categories,” de Poortere says.

Standing for the English Romanticists in the sale is The Skylark, Dedham (recto); Study of a Cow Standing in a Stream (verso), a 9-inch by 8-inch landscape painted by Constable in his later years, which Christie’s estimates will sell for between US$800,000 and US$1.2 million.

Constable, who lived from 1776 to 1837, used a palette knife to execute this pre-Impressionist work of a scene where he had spent a lot of time, de Poortere says. “It’s small, but incredibly desirable and collectible.”

Feigen’s interest in Italian works was nurtured with the help of Laurence Kanter, today the chief curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, where 60 paintings from Feigen’s collection were exhibited in September 2010. (They were also featured in a book by Kanter.)

The art dealer not only learned from Kanter, he also developed his eye, which led to many discoveries of Old Masters works, de Poortere says. These are pictures that have been hidden or lost, and when they resurface they are studied, reassessed by scholars, and credited to the rightful artists, he says.

To Feigen, the ability to have an “eye” for great works is amplified through learning, but, he says, “You’re born with it—it starts with a feeling, a taste.”

Aside from being a vocal proponent of Old Masters, Feigen has been involved with museums in the U.S. and internationally, where Christie’s says “he was influential in placing important works” with The Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Feigen bought many of these works, which de Poortere describes as “museum quality,” in the 1980s and 1990s. The Carracci was sold at a Christie’s auction in London in 1920, and then by Phillips in London in 1987, when Feigen acquired it. The Prophet Isaiah by Lorenzo Monaco, who lived in the late 1300s to early 1400s, also was bought by Feigen in 1987, but at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

Monaco’s circular work, or “tondo,” (with an estimate between US$1.5 million and US$2.5 million), was part of the Annunciation altarpiece in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

Highlights from the Collection of Richard L. Feigen will tour Los Angeles, New York, London, Dubai, and Hong Kong, beginning Jan. 9, before returning to be included within Christie’s Old Masters sale in New York on May 2.

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